In 1867, in Norfolk, Virginia, two formerly enslaved women named Annetta M. Lane and Harriet R. Taylor founded what would become the oldest Black women’s organization in the United States. They called it the United Order of Tents — the name a reference to the tents that freedom seekers had used as shelter along the Underground Railroad, where both women had served as conductors before emancipation. Lane had been a nurse on the plantation where she was enslaved, developing the medical knowledge and organizational capacity that would shape the institution she built. They founded the organization in the same year that Fayetteville State University was established ninety miles to the southwest, the same year that Archibald Beebe was murdered at the Fayetteville Market House, the same year that the Freedmen’s Bureau was being systematically defunded by a federal government retreating from its Reconstruction commitments. 1867 was the year Black Americans built their own institutions because they had no choice.
Lane and Taylor could not incorporate the organization in their own names — Virginia law did not permit Black women to legally incorporate a fraternal organization. They incorporated it instead under the names of two white abolitionists who had supported their Underground Railroad work: Joshua R. Giddings and John Jolliffe. The formal name — the J.R. Giddings and Jollife Union — obscured its founders so that it could legally exist. This was not unusual. It was the standard practice by which Black institution-building in the post-Civil War South navigated the legal architecture designed to prevent it. The people who built the institution were not the people permitted to put their names on its founding documents. The institution survived and the names of its actual founders are now on the historical record. That correction took time.
The United Order of Tents was a secret society — its rituals, membership criteria, and internal organization known only to members. The secrecy was not ceremonial. It was functional. During slavery, secrecy had been essential to the Underground Railroad work that gave the organization its origins. After emancipation, secrecy protected the organization’s membership and activities from white scrutiny and interference in a Southern legal environment that was hostile to organized Black civic life. Members referred to each other as Sister. They wore white at meetings. They built a network of mutual aid that provided what the state refused to provide — financial assistance, burial insurance, healthcare, loans when banks would not lend, shelter for the elderly when no public institution would care for them. The organization’s motto was the same as the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs: Lift as We Climb.
The services the Tents provided were not charitable gestures. They were survival infrastructure. In an era when Black Americans could not access white banks, could not rely on white hospitals, could not count on white-controlled public assistance, and faced the constant economic precarity produced by a century of unpaid labor followed by a century of systematic exclusion, the mutual aid network the Tents built was the difference between surviving a crisis and not surviving it. The organization established the Rest Haven Home for Adults in 1897 — a nursing home for elderly members who had no family to care for them. It ran for 105 years, funded entirely by its members, without debt, until it closed in 2002. The Tents also provided burial insurance — ensuring that their members would be buried with dignity in a society that had denied Black people dignity in life. They provided loans. They built low-income housing in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Danville, Virginia, and Norfolk. They contributed to the United Negro College Fund, the Special Olympics, and sickle cell anemia research. They sent mission workers to Kenya, Liberia, India, and Guyana. They did all of this while maintaining a secrecy that protected their members and a governance structure that gave women organizational authority and leadership experience in an era when both were systematically denied to Black women.
The United Order of Tents still exists. The Southern District No. 1 in Norfolk — the founding chapter — remains the national headquarters. North Carolina has had active chapters throughout the organization’s history, and the Rest Haven Home that operated for over a century was located in the state. The organization’s peak membership of approximately 50,000 women represented one of the largest Black women’s civic organizations in American history. Most Americans have never heard of it. It operated in secret, by design, and that secrecy — which protected it for over a century — also kept it from the historical record that institutions receive when they are visible. This archive is a place for the record that secrecy and neglect have obscured. The United Order of Tents belongs in it.